First Impressions: Lana Del Rey’s Young & Beautiful picks up where Video Games left off

Lana Del Rey, Young & Beautiful: Listen to the Great Gatsby song here

Born to Die whiffed on a large degree of the promise of Lana Del Rey, but if anything that only makes Video Game something more special. As a distillation of our culture’s weird and disparate youth obsession, it’s pretty much a perfect piece of art: It’s got the precocious, uneasy sexuality of a young woman smacking headlong into the boorish ignorance of a young man, Del Rey’s smoky sensuousness, and even some of her emotional confessions, punctured again and again by its chorus’s dimwit. It works as much as a diary-like take on reality as a girl-power message slipped inside a barely-there sun dress.

Del Rey’s contribution to the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s latest extravaganza finally picks up where Video Games left off. In terms of relevance to The Great Gatsby, its obsession with decay and the fleeting nature of the good life certainly resonate, but this is better as a purely Del Rey kind of artifact, if you figure that project of her career up until now has been the dark, or at least somewhat dim, side of being young and beautiful.

If at first whiff the song is a little bit on-the-nose-y, by the second minute its bald directness becomes its appeal. Forget all the metaphorical BS: One day this all will fade, and I don’t want to be alone when it does.

Implicit in all this is the realization that the only reason some of this is happening is because of youth and beauty: The gilded world Rey describes in the verses only comes with youth’s shine. Unlike most of her fast-living contemporaries, though — and, hell, some of her delusional seniors — Del Rey at least gets a little reflective in the gloss, and is slightly scared by what she sees.

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This again feels like something uniquely feminine: compare her existential terror of aging with, say, Paul McCartney’s hammy love song, which quickly turns his question around to a listing of minor domestic bliss (and a reminder, of course, that she’s going to get as old as he is). Though Del Rey revels in her opposite number’s out-of-the-wrapper sexiness — “Oh that grace, oh that body / Oh that face makes me wanna party” — there’s no sense of his decline, only concern about where her aching soul might turn, when it comes time. And even after twice repeating “I know you will,” well, there that terrible question rears its head again, and we know what she thinks of that assurance.

The sentiments aren’t entirely new, but Del Rey is almost alone among her peers in expressing them. Just as Video Games mourned the price paid for investing your sexuality into the opinions of the immature male, Young and Beautiful notes with creeping dread the horrible bargain involved in getting outsized attention, at least in part, for a fleeting characteristic. Her soul already aches, it’s just in a nice package for now.

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